Non-Technical Summary:
Both in Australia and internationally it is well-established that social and economic advantage tends to persist from one generation to the next. For example, the educational attainment of parents strongly corresponds with the educational attainment of their children once they reach adulthood. In recent years, the international literature has turned to examining how education outcomes are transferred across three generations, from grandparents to parents to grandchildren. This working paper provides a description of what these patterns look like in Australian families.
Using data from the Longitudinal Study of Australia, we map out how the educational attainment of grandparents corresponds with the educational attainment of parents, and in turn, how the educational attainment of both grandparents and parents predict reading and numeracy scores among grandchildren. We examine these relationships for mothers, fathers, maternal grandmothers, maternal grandfathers, paternal grandmothers and paternal grandfathers.
As expected, higher levels of education among grandparents were associated not only with higher levels of parent education, but also with numeracy and reading achievement scores among their grandchildren, and the association between grandparents and grandchildren remained even after accounting for parent education. We also found that the likelihood of mothers or fathers completing a university degree was higher if their own parents had a university qualification, but also if their partner or spouse’s parents had a university qualification, suggesting that the human capital that grandparents pass on to their offspring increases not only their offspring’s likelihood of attaining high levels of education, but also their likelihood of partnering with a highly educated person.
The effect of higher educational attainment in grandparents on parent and grandchild educational outcomes was broadly limited to grandparents who had obtained a university qualification. In a generation where few grandparents had an opportunity or expectation to attend university than the current generation of parents, we also find that mothers and fathers had higher educational attainment if grandparents—and grandfathers in particular—showed a lot of interest in education while parents were growing up, irrespective of grandparent education level. Finally, we also found that achievement scores of grandchildren were substantially higher in families with concentrations of educational advantage – particularly when both their mother and father had a university qualification, or if both their grandmother and grandfather had a university qualification.